The beauty of Hoyte Van Hoytema's cinema
Wednesday, July 5, 2023 at 10:00AM 
Oppenheimer approaches on July 21st! Christopher Nolan's latest promises a great deal, from the historical examination of a man that changed the world to an ambitious test of how far the director's practical-over-digital effects philosophy can hold in the face of such a challenge. I'm more skeptical about it than some, though some things seem sure. Chief among them is that the picture will look great, another feather in the cap of Dutch-Swedish cinematographer genius Hoyte Van Hoytema. In his honor, let's revisit the Oscar nominees' biggest hits, from vampirical hauntings to 'Jean Jacket'…
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) Tomas Alfredson
Though they might be frozen in time, their skin a white glow like the midday sun, vampires are creatures of the night. So it is in Thomas Alfredson's adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel about a bullied Stockholm pre-teen forging friendship with the strange girl next door. The evening hours are pitch-black, ink spilled over the screen, starless night sky or shadows ready to turn domesticity alien. You can feel this dark in your skin, sinking teeth into flesh until it reaches the bone, a poison spreading through your veins, chilling the blood. The projected image will make you shiver.
However, it'd be wrong to summarize Hoytema's work in the vampire flick as a mere shadow conductor. If possible, light is sicklier than its opposite, for it reveals gaunt visages and an austere world defined by frost; it looks more inhuman than the monsters proper. Often shot against the snowy landscape, young Kåre Hedebrant looks a ghost or cadaver-like. Light levels balanced equal between subject and background, he merges into the deadened environment.
That's Hoytema's greatest trick – he makes the world of day a clinical morgue so that the dead night is more comforting by comparison. Never mind the dangers lurking.
Let the Right One In is currently streaming on Fubo TV, Hoopla, Kanopy, and Magnolia Selects. You can also rent it on most services.
THE FIGHTER (2010) David O. Russell
The international success of Let the Right One In, not to mention the picture's unmissable formal quality, led many of its makers to career opportunities beyond Swedish borders. That said, it's hard to grasp how the austerity of that exercise led Russell to pick Hoytema. A director of actor-oriented chaos, grounded by loose ideas of realism, David O. Russell prefers a camera attuned to performance above all. It shall move with the actors, break spaces according to their energy, define visual moods by rhyming behavioral cues, rhythms, colors.
This real-life story of brothers Micky and Dicky Ward is no exception, though there's a finesse to the lensing of location that's sometimes absent from other Russell projects. Notice the ineffable dusting of rust over the grainy screen, Amy Adams' red hair popping, flushed skin so hot you can practically feel the heat. Another critical detail is the use of video to shoot ring-set scenes, fights philtered by textural nostalgia for mediums of another time. The Fighter looks faithful to the TV techniques without losing sight of its own cinematic language.
The Fighter is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus, and Classix. It's also available to rent on most of the big platforms.
TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (2011) Tomas Alfredson
When it came time for Alfredson to leap into Anglophone cinema, the director reunited with Hoyte Van Hoytema. The result is one of the best le Carré big-screen adaptations, summoning a lived-in vision of the 1970s Cold War spy scene that's as much a time capsule as a trapped ghost in need of exorcism. It looks all decayed in shades of brown and grey, denuded of life but still moving, a drudging machine that splices its characters' existence in boxes and frames, glass cages, smoke screens. The immersive quality depends on design and photography equally, feeling visceral to the point that you can almost taste the air.
This is also an excellent example of Hoytema's monochrome tendencies, where he limits the shades captured by the camera to such a degree color shots feel on the verge of lightly tinted black-and-white. Admittedly, it isn't ever-present in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Many sequences break that strategy in order to better present the complex storytelling structure.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is streaming on Starz and DirecTV. It's available to rent and purchase on most of the bigger platforms.
HER (2013) Spike Jonze
Tomorrow is primary colors smothered into absolute softness, twilight pastels, pink skies and orange sherbert that feel like tender kiss on the viewer's cheek – such is the future as Her presents. So beautiful, yet cruel, for this dream in dessert hues tastes like ash in the mouth, all isolated souls and loneliness. Probably the prettiest of Hoyte Van Hoytema's films, Her is a testament to his ability to create specific humors through precise aesthetics.
It's also great proof of the artist's craft, finding a thousand ways to shoot Joaquin Phoenix in thoughtful close-up without falling into monotony. Appropriately enough, despite its sometimes retro style, futurism dictates many of the cinematographer's choices, including the use of digital to capture a digital day to come rather than the filmstock he usually prefers.
Her is streaming on the Criterion Channel. It's also available to rent on most of the more prominent platforms, available to rent and purchase across the board.
INTERSTELLAR (2014) Christopher Nolan
After The Dark Knight Rises, a significant shift happened in Christopher Nolan's filmography. His go-to DP, Wally Pfister, decided to move away from the cinematographer job, trying his luck as a director instead. That left the British auteur needing a new collaborator, artistically divorced from the man who had helped define the look of his cinema. That's where Hoyte Van Hoytema comes in. To a certain degree, the Swedish cineaste bends his style to the rules defined before his involvement in his director's career. Still, that's only true up to a point.
Nolan's growing investment in IMAX meant his movies would inevitably change. The most significant innovation Hoytema brought was the stylistic philosophy with which he approached the technical marvel of IMAX. In his hands, the format becomes the vehicle for epic intimacy rather than just epic-scale sights. Shallow depth of field is crucial, as it is in most of the cinematographer's major works. The short focus, prevalent since his Nordic days, allows for more expressive transformations of the frame within the same shot, often oscillating our attention between details, object, subject, background.
Moreover, isolation as a central tenet reappears after the future of Her, now displayed in close-ups of actors adrift in a sea made by diffuse brushstrokes of color and light. To underline the smallness of humans in the cosmos, Hoytema pierces their personal bubble rather than just positing bodies against the vast infinity of spaces beyond space. Such swirls of ideas create a memorable picture, maybe Nolan's most sentimental and prone to operatic grandeur.
Still, technical perfection is never put aside in the name of emotion. It lives on, in the use of up-to-date CGI married to classical, even antiquated technique, like a penchant for rear projection as a lighting mechanism. Notice all this, learn to love it, and you'll understand how, since Interstellar, Hoyte Van Hoytema has become the foremost master of IMAX cinematography in Hollywood today.
Interstellar is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus, MGM+, and FXNow.
SPECTRE (2015) Sam Mendes
Taking on the James Bond franchise after Roger Deakins took it to the photographic peaks of Skyfall is one heck of a challenge, mayhap even thankless in retrospect. Even now, it's hard to decide if Hoytema's approach, putting his stamp on the material rather than aping the old master that came before him, was a good comparison-repellant choice or a failure. In any case, Spectre looks nothing like Skyfall. Gone are the contrasting jewel tones and gleaming light to punch up the shadow's void. Instead, the Dutch-Swedish filmmaker strips the vivid shades away, like pouring paint thinner over Deakins' Bondian stylings.
Long sequences are reduced to one color, expanded in varying scales to bless the screen with depth. Italian funerals are marble grey, evil meetings a cascade of amber over woodgrain, desert scenes sand-blasted to blinding off-white. Glamour is no more, though beauty prevails, heavy and sorrowful, like the narrative devised for the gloomiest of 007 adventures.
Spectre is streaming on Fubo TV, FXNow, and DirecTV. It's also on most platforms, available to rent and purchase.
DUNKIRK (2017) Christopher Nolan
While naturalism is a constant in the cinematographer's career, some projects exemplify that better than others. Dunkirk is the height of this artist's search for a cinema that reproduces reality as it is, not objectively captured per se, but presented to better pull the audience into a recognition of their own world. Such cinema depends on creativity and engineering wit alike. For example, further developments in the technology of IMAX cameras allowed Hoytema and Nolan to explore the format's potential for direct-experience immediacy – something akin to a VR hallucination without the goggles. They set the cameras on airplane wings, IMAX machines operated hand-held, stuffed into cramped environments, and even underwater.
One gets a sense of the past purveyed without rose-colored glasses, any whiff of nostalgia, romanticism shot between the eyes before the credits roll. It's very robust and muscular, an action thriller version of a historical episode that's so much about movement and time that any notions of character are eroded into near nothingness. To date, Dunkirk represents Hoyte Van Hoytema's only Best Cinematography Oscar nomination.
Dunkirk is streaming on Netflix and Max. It's also available on most major platforms to rent and purchase.
AD ASTRA (2019) James Gray
Take Hoytema's monochrome strategies of Tinker and Spectre, dial the saturation levels to eleven, and get something close to the wavering of gem-like Ad Astra. As ever with Gray's cinema, the screen sings a song of times lost, New Hollywood brought back from the dead for a sci-fi future that seems conceptualized from our past. The lunar chase is another miracle of old-school mechanism in tandem with the latest visual effects, but it's the Mars' sequences that most impress with their boxed-in despair, blazing bright beside projections of a nature that can be dreamed, never touched.
It's always out of reach in a movie so much about the distance between people and places, people and people, and even people and themselves. Ad Astra might be Hoyte Van Hoytema's most impressive effort outside of IMAX, showing us a space odyssey where no astronomical vista is more exciting than the track of light shed by a tear over Brad Pitt's face.
Ad Astra is streaming on Fubi TV and DirecTV. You can rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Youtube, and the Microsoft Store.
TENET (2020) Christopher Nolan
Time out of sorts, this cacophony of action nonsense commands you to embrace the chaos. Enjoying the ride is the point, as its out to fuck with your perception as part of its entertainment proposition. Continuing what he'd done in Interstellar, Hoytema opted for spherical lenses in Tenet, eliminating the texture of light on air, glares excised for a crisp image that's almost tactile in its sharpness. Reach out, and you'll get cut. And yet, this is no gnarly piece of shrapnel. Nolan and his cinematographer wield their picture-making mastery like an elegant dagger instead. Graceful in its calamitous mess, Tenet is gorgeous to behold, whether appreciating the smooth modernity of cityscapes, Chronos mutilated between red and blue rooms, the sheer splendor of a yacht floating over water laced with gold sunlight. Like it or not, you can't deny this sci-fi thriller's visual sophistication.
Tenet is streaming on DirecTV, TNT, TBS, and tru TV. It's accessible to rent or purchase on most major platforms.
NOPE (2022) Jordan Peele
Hoyte Van Hoytema gestures back to the past's true and tried techniques as he walks toward the future of cinema, new technologies and new possibilities. This underlying dichotomy made him the perfect person to bring Jordan Peele's third feature to life, a movie that points to film history even as it gallops to what lies ahead, a Black cowboy jumping from Muybridge to IMAX extravaganza. Nothing better exemplifies this than the nightmarish middle act of Nope, starting with the cramped gullet of a living monument before diving into nocturnal murk, blood rain over troubled land.
In that marvelous sequence, the old day-for-night trickery is given a 21st-century update, not through digital color grading exclusively, but also through the use of two cameras shooting simultaneously. One in the standard register, the other an infrared machine that later helped to create that striking Nope look.
Who can tell what Hoytema's next majestic madness shall be? I can't wait to see it.
Nope is streaming on Amazon Prime Video. It's also available to rent and purchase on several other platforms.
What's your favorite Hoyte Van Hoytema film? Which films do you wish he'd been Oscar nominated for?
Reader Comments (5)
Wonderous images,I am very fond of his work in Nope.
I also LOOOOVE this work on NOPE. I kind of wish he could get away from Nolan because he is so brilliant every time and I dont like Nolan's films that much.
I admire more than enjoy Nolans films,I think he's overrated to be quite honest but his films look gorgeous.
Her is one of the best-looking films I've ever seen, so I'll go with that for favorite. Runner-up: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
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